The Weekly Weird - 2015-10-30

Housekeeping note: If you have issues viewing this on the web let me know. I switched from restructured text to markdown on the backend and turned https back on thanks to the Let's Encrypt beta (!)

• If the studies are right…you would expect someone who eats a bacon sandwich every day to live, on average, two years less than someone who does not. Pro rata, this is like losing an hour of your life for every bacon sandwich you eat. To put this into context, every time you smoke 20 cigarettes, this will take about five hours off your life. -- David Spiegelhalter (RISK PROFESSOR!)

• A faster grep (because SSE/AVX basically).

• I told you it wasn't a Dyson sphere.
• Spintires is one of my favoritest video games and it's (finally) gotten an update!
• "That's like having a gun where the muzzle points backwards if you forget a step assembling it."
• A Faster Cutting Plane Method and its Implications for Combinatorial and Convex Optimization is causing quite a stir.
• Autonomous. Drifting. Delorean.
• HOW ARE WE ALL STILL ALIVE?! (via, and be sure to read the small print at the end of the article.)
• I love the idea of artificial photosynthesis, though of course there's a few too many moving parts to make this actually useful right now. The real killer app would be a box that could combine normal air and electricity and produce hydrocarbons. It doesn't seem like removing CO₂ from the atmosphere is like, totally insane; that little snippet sets the cost of pure carbon dioxide at ~$600/ton, Wolfram Alpha assures me that a ton of diesel fuel costs about $662 so maybe it's not that far off? Or maybe I have no idea what the actual costs look like here.
• You can just stick some bits together and chuck a magnetic, webserving camera on to anything.
• I'm always interested in obscure booze knowledge. [via]
• Remember, the cell network is not magically secure and attacks using it are getting cheaper.
• But that's ok since your computer is just fucked anyway. Be sure to check out the LightEater slides, they're ... ahem ... enlightening.
• Related, a good writeup about the most recent xen vulnerability.
• It's been an annoying problem for me for at least a decade but it's finally feasible to assign netfilter rules to a specific process via cgroups.
• From the Chinese-megastructures department: a radio telescope 2.5 times larger than Aricebo.
• Detecting lies by storytelling.
• IEEE Spectrum has a long examination on IT failures, which I confess I haven't yet read.
• Also at Spectrum, acoustic holograms, levitation and tractor beams. You know, the usual.
• The most unstoppable cyberwarfare group in the world, with ~479 successful DoS attacks goes public.
• Fighter jets track military blimp drifting over Pennsylvania is a delightful headline.
• For example, "Cherry" comes before "banana". In a numeric sort, 9 comes before 80, but because numbers are converted to strings, "80" comes before "9" in Unicode order. Still better than Perl.
• Midway through really interesting discussion on a new type of welding I stoped caring because YOU CAN WELD WOOD?!
• Twitch played pokemon, now it's installing Arch linux. What could go wrong.